How to Save Your Relationship with Lee Baucom

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LEE BAUCOM
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• Doctor Lee Baucom of Save the Marriage dot com.
  He became disenchanted with the efficiency of
  traditional psychotherapy just as he was
  finishing his PhD in training. He began to expand
  his approach at that time, 25 years ago, to
  include coaching, paradigm theory, community
  building, and mindfulness. Doctor Baucom expanded
  his expertise into the new fields of resilience
  and positive psychology since then, he's worked
  to help couples and individuals have thriving
  lives and relationships. Now Doctor Baucom refers
  to himself as a thriveologist, admitting he could
  also do a better job of thriving. After suffering
  a life-threatening illness, he realized they
  needed to make important shifts in his own life.

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• Now he's the creator of several online programs
  designed to save marriages and relationships, has
  authored the best-selling book on marriage, has
  created several videos on dealing with stress,
  and shares two podcasts each week one on
  relationships, and one on thriving. He's married
  with two children, and in his spare time he trail
  runs, paddle boards, and scuba dives.

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• There are lot of things that he thinks, they're
  not throwaways, but they're just kind of the
  world stuff. What hes most proud of, he guess,
  is the relationships they have in their family.

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• The most part of watching his kids grow up, hes
  most proud of the relationship with his wife, he
  is proud of the bestseller stuff and things like
  that, but that for him, is kind of the background
  noise to really having a thriving life. You've
  got to do these things to get through life, but
  what hes really proud of are the relationships.

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• His wife is a therapist, also. A lot of people
  go, "Oh, a few therapists. You must be doing the,
  Oh, I hear what you're saying, kind of stuff.
  But the reality is that it's a lot easier to be a
  kind of dispassionate person when we're dealing
  with other people than when it's your own life.

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• People would come into his office and say, You
  know what? I've decided to quit my job, and he
  had no bearing. You know, nothing mattered what
  they said, and he was able to say, Sure. If
  that's good for you, that's great, but it's
  little different within a marriage, so he thinks
  we have a great marriage, but every marriage has
  its struggles.

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• One of the things that he often tell people is,
  One hundred percent of marriages are going to
  have difficult times.

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• One hundred percent. About 50 are going to
  figure out some way to work through them. He
  never said, Oh, you're going to have a perfect
  marriage.

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• Every marriage has its struggles and that's where
  you learn, so he thinks we have an outstanding
  marriage, but we always have the places where
  we've got to figure out a new way to find that
  smooth surface when we're rubbing each other a
  little bit raw. How to use that more like
  smoothing down would with sandpaper, and he
  thinks that's just kind of the nature of
  marriage. He thinks that's where you learn about
  each other, and more than that he think that's
  where you learn about yourself.

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50
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• There's some research about that. He thinks a lot
  of the research that really holds some water is,
  the spouse we find is usually a combination of
  both the good and bad elements, really of both
  parents.

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• Certainly there's influence from the opposite sex
  parent research shows that there's actually more
  influence for women and their fathers than for
  men and their mothers.

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• But he does think we tend to find somebody that
  has some of those pieces there, unfinished from
  childhood, and some of those places where we felt
  most loved from childhood. He gets a little
  worried when people boil it down to being that
  simple, kind of a parent issue, because there are
  also sibling issues and a lot of life experience
  issues that affect that also.

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